For miles below him, it rushed along the base of the mighty wall, until it reached the not less forbidding barrier of the black thorn-jungle.
For months he had voyaged that yellow tide; he had learned to face its thousand perils.
But the others had been with him then; they had been on board the raft; they had been armed against the ferocious life of river and air and jungle.
Anxiously, he looked about him for Aladoree—in vain.
When he had breath, he shouted her name.
His voice was a thin, useless sound, weak and hoarse, drowned hi the roar from the chaos behind him where the flood from the drams met the river’s mighty tide.
But he saw her, presently, a hundred yards below him.
Her head a tiny thing, bobbing upon the boiling yellow surface.
Her body too small, he realized, too frail, too weary, to struggle long against the savage river.
He swam toward her heavily, his limbs all but dead.
The turbid current moved her toward him; it carried her farther again, faster than he could swim; wild water taunted him until, in the near-delirium of exhaustion, he gasped curses at it as if it had been sentiently malicious.
She saw him; she struggled feebly toward him, through rough yellow foam, as they raced along in the shadow of the walls.
He glanced back, sometimes, hoping that one of the other three might have come through alive, and saw none of them.
Aladoree vanished before his eyes, when he was not a dozen feet from her, sucked down by a pitiless current; she appeared again as he was about to dive hopelessly for her, flung up helpless in the freakish water.
He caught her arm, dragged it across his shoulder.
“Hang on,” he gasped.
And he added with a last grim spark of spirit: “If you can trust an Ulnar.”
With the brief, wan ghost of a smile, she clung to him.
The yellow, swirling foam bore them on, under the mighty, marching walls, toward the river-bend below.
There the thorn-jungle waited.
24 “For Want of a Nail”
John Star had never any clear recollection of that time in the river.
In the ultimate stages of exhaustion, driven far beyond the normal limits of endurance, he was more machine than man.
Somehow he kept himself afloat, and Aladoree.
But that was all he knew.
The feel of gravel beneath his feet brought purpose briefly back.
He waded and crawled up out of the yellow water, on the edge of a wide, smooth bar of black sand, carrying the limp girl.
Three hundred yards across the dark bare sand rose the jungle.
A barrier of black and interwoven swords, it towered forbidding against the crimson sky.
It was splashed with huge, vivid blooms of flaming violet that gave it a certain terrible beauty; and it hid death in many guises.
The open sand, John Star knew, was a no-man’s-land, menaced from the river and the jungle and the air.
But he had scant heed left for danger.
Pulling the exhausted girl safely out of the yellow shallows, into the dubious shelter of a mass of driftwood lodged against a sand-buried snag, he fell beside her on the sand.
Fatigue overcame him there.
He knew, when he woke, that precious hours were lost.
The huge disk of the red sun was already cut in half by the edge of the jungle; the air already chill with a deadly hint of coming night.
Aladoree lay beside him on the black sand, sleeping.
Looking at her slight, defenseless form, breathing so slowly and so quietly, he felt an aching throb in his chest.
How many times, he wondered, as they lay there, had death passed by on the yellow river, or stared from the wall of thorns—and spared their lives, and AKKA, and humanity’s hope?
He tried to sit up, sank back with a gasp of pain.
Every individual muscle in his body was stiffly rebellious.
Yet he forced himself up, rubbed his painful limbs until some flexibility returned to them, and got unsteadily to his feet.
First he picked Aladoree up in his arms, still sleeping, and carried her higher on the bar, beyond the unseen peril that might strike from the shallows.
He made a flimsy little screen of driftwood, to hide them, and found a heavy club; he waited by her, to watch until she woke.
With wary glance he scanned the tawny river, flowing away until the farther dark jungle wall was dim in red haze.
He searched the bare waste of somber sand, the black thorn-barrier behind it; the ramparts of the black metropolis, miles up-river, just visible above the jungle.
But it was out of the murky sky that danger came, gliding down on silent wings.
The creature was low when he saw it, diving at the sleeping girl .behind her little screen of branches.
Somewhat it resembled a dragon-fly grown to monstrous size.
It had four thin wings, spreading thirty feet.